Saltlight Ledger

At dawn the streetlights unzip from the rain, small suns pooling in the backs of potholes; a bus exhales at the corner, its doors opening like a held breath released.

A woman shakes her umbrella into silver commas, and the pavement keeps each mark for a moment before traffic edits the sentence away; steam climbs from grates in slow, patient chords.

Under the bridge, pigeons lift as one gray thought, wheel once through scaffolds of pale light, then settle on girders dark with old weather, as if reading names carved there by rust.

By noon the city will harden into errands, but now everything is still half-water, half-music; in every window a moving sky is borrowed, and given back without a sound.